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the no-aliens ever makes you fear for our future?


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#61 Luna

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Posted 24 June 2010 - 05:59 PM

Alien psychology would probably be vastly different from ours. Maybe its extremely rare for a species to evolve emotions that make them even care what's beyond their planet.


Well, most humans don't care for anything beyond this planet. Most humans don't truly care for much at all actually.

I think if species evolves it has to have similar "constraints" to what we had, that means they will have to be conditioned for self survival, either as individuals or as a group. Which therefore doesn't imply it has to be selfish but it can be.

Most won't care for the starts until evolved enough, other will care for it just like humans do/did at times: Achievement, control, power, worth and proving. That ain't for the right reasons.

#62 Forever21

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Posted 24 July 2010 - 08:24 AM

My boyfriend found this:
http://www.telegraph...turns-moon.html

Interesting! Posted Image





That's where Justin Bieber came from.

#63 Brafarality

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Posted 24 July 2010 - 05:38 PM

Had an inspired conversation about the Fermi Paradox with my better half just a few weeks ago, and to every possible explanation as to why they are not here, the appropriate Fermi-Paradox answer is: It only takes one.
Don't wanna interfere? Only takes one to interfere.
Long interstellar distances? Only takes one to not care and make Von Neumann probes.
Already here? Only takes one that is here and actually detectable via human sensory perception.
It is a paradox of scale and odds.
I have yet to hear anything resembling a satisfactory answer to the Fermi Paradox other than that we are alone in the universe, and am much more for exploration of the inner universe that is consciousness.
Had to throw in a consciousness plug and espouse property dualism. :)

Regards, yallz.

Edited by Brafarality, 24 July 2010 - 05:38 PM.


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#64 Reno

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Posted 04 August 2010 - 03:25 PM

Could it possibly be that aliens capable of interstellar travel use the singularity as a developmental filter? If a species doesn't implode due to political and technological forces then they are proven stable enough to communicate with.

That would explain why throughout most of history we have had very few sightings of UFOs until just within the last hundred years. We weren't interesting enough to attract the attention of a more advanced specie.

Edited by Reno, 04 August 2010 - 03:26 PM.


#65 Brafarality

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Posted 04 August 2010 - 04:43 PM

My boyfriend found this:
http://www.telegraph...turns-moon.html

Interesting! Posted Image

Wow. Cool stuff.
Im so on the outside looking in when it comes to theories and evidence of alien life and all related supernatural pursuits.
TLP, rods, LFA, IEB, HE, will o the wisp, and so on.
Would love in five years to be in that kind of mindframe and interactivity with the world where its natural for me to know when the next investigation into ley lines is taking place, or what was just theorized or uncovered about the sphinx. Just have to dive in like into a flowing river to immerse and merge (like Graham Hancock: he lives it).

Really interesting possibilities here, though, of course, as the 8 or so peeps leaving comments point out, there is much to doubt.
Cheers all.

TLP: transient lunar phenomena
LFA: low frequency audio
IEB: inner earth beings
HE: hollow earth

#66 abolitionist

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Posted 06 October 2010 - 07:04 AM

What is the filter preventing us from discovering them?

Your government. They aren't going to tell you about it.

UFOs may in fact be the government who would rather have you believe halfheartedly in alien lifeforms than know about their advanced technologies.
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#67 churchill

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Posted 06 October 2010 - 01:06 PM

This does not really make me fear for the future, as the reason aliens have not come here already could simply because it just is not practical because the speed of light cannot be breached or realistically even approached. Couple that with life probably being vary sparse such that most planets cannot support it, it makes sense that no species would bother with interstellar travel.

#68 Luna

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Posted 06 October 2010 - 02:51 PM

This does not really make me fear for the future, as the reason aliens have not come here already could simply because it just is not practical because the speed of light cannot be breached or realistically even approached. Couple that with life probably being vary sparse such that most planets cannot support it, it makes sense that no species would bother with interstellar travel.


But that is another problem.

If they can't come here, it may also point out that our technological future might not be sufficient to maintain life indefinitely :/

This I related to second law of thermodynamics, possible lack of energy, decay.. so on.

#69 churchill

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Posted 07 October 2010 - 04:08 PM

This does not really make me fear for the future, as the reason aliens have not come here already could simply because it just is not practical because the speed of light cannot be breached or realistically even approached. Couple that with life probably being vary sparse such that most planets cannot support it, it makes sense that no species would bother with interstellar travel.


But that is another problem.

If they can't come here, it may also point out that our technological future might not be sufficient to maintain life indefinitely :/

This I related to second law of thermodynamics, possible lack of energy, decay.. so on.


I don't exactly see how that follows from technological limits caused by hard physics laws. With the technology we have today we can maintain a car in perpetuity as long as we have enough energy + resources. Those will last for long enough to put the long in longevity.

#70 Luna

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Posted 07 October 2010 - 05:25 PM

But not the im in immortality.

#71 churchill

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Posted 11 October 2010 - 12:59 PM

But not the im in immortality.


It does as long as your definition of immortality is no death by aging, it does not preclude getting splatted by a car.

#72 Luna

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Posted 11 October 2010 - 02:03 PM

I am not sure how one can confuse the definition of immortality, it is most definitely not just avoiding death by aging but any death at all...

#73 churchill

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Posted 12 October 2010 - 01:10 PM

I am not sure how one can confuse the definition of immortality, it is most definitely not just avoiding death by aging but any death at all...


Immortality does not preclude death. You just have to look at The mythology of the gods in ancient times to see that as so.
I agree that your definition is the more common one found, but mine is also to be found:)

#74 Cameron

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Posted 23 October 2010 - 06:33 AM

These are the kind of disasters that can bring a civilization to it's knees. Then there are the kinds that will easily destroy even succesfull and wide-spread land animal species, like supervolcano eruption, large meteorite impact, hydrogen sulfide disaster, methane catastrophe, snowball earth etc. etc.



This is only a temporary vulnerability. Super-intelligence coupled with advanced molecular machinery should be able to react and adapt fast enough, to any survivable scenario.

I only hope either rarity or almost inevitable optimal solutions(say it is relatively easy to open a doorway to untapped parallel universes with infinite computation) are behind the paradox.

Despite the vast potential of this universe, it seems we'd get stuck at false godhood with currently foreseen technological progress and the various foreseen possible future developments of the universe. The true power, true immortality, and embodiment with the true laws behind existence, seems out of reach. I don't see why the state of a true god need be exclusive, but it does seem to necessitate independence. In any case, even if completely unaffected, there are many individuals who would abhor an entity, any entity, attaining true godhood.

#75 Sumol

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Posted 24 October 2010 - 09:40 AM

Like, where are they? how come no one is there? does it mean we are doomed to fail too? feels like it :/


Must have taken a 180° turn and ran after they caught the old radioshows we send out.

What can we offer? If they can travel here they will have far superior technology, the only thing we have is ressources, chances are it will end worse than with the indians in america.

#76 niner

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Posted 25 October 2010 - 03:11 AM

Like, where are they? how come no one is there? does it mean we are doomed to fail too? feels like it :/

Must have taken a 180° turn and ran after they caught the old radioshows we send out.

What can we offer? If they can travel here they will have far superior technology, the only thing we have is ressources, chances are it will end worse than with the indians in america.

If all they want is resources, it is highly likely that they will be able to find whatever element they need much closer to home, or create it themselves. Applying twentieth century sensibilities to life forms that are many centuries or millennia advanced over us isn't likely to give us good answers.

#77 Sumol

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Posted 25 October 2010 - 08:01 PM

Like, where are they? how come no one is there? does it mean we are doomed to fail too? feels like it :/

Must have taken a 180° turn and ran after they caught the old radioshows we send out.

What can we offer? If they can travel here they will have far superior technology, the only thing we have is ressources, chances are it will end worse than with the indians in america.

If all they want is resources, it is highly likely that they will be able to find whatever element they need much closer to home, or create it themselves.

That's the point, it explains why noone came here.

#78 mentatpsi

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Posted 17 December 2010 - 12:20 AM

Like, where are they? how come no one is there? does it mean we are doomed to fail too? feels like it :/


obviously you haven't watched the X-Files :P

#79 TianZi

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Posted 09 January 2011 - 04:01 AM

Fascinating topic. I don't have time to read all the replies, but Forever21 put together a nice list. I'd like to add to that list just one rather chilling possibility:

A long time ago, an alien race located somewhere in the universe achieved a technological singularity. For whatever reason (perhaps negative first-hand experience, or simply a desire to reduce existential risks), this race concluded it was in its self-interest to locate and preemptively destroy other intelligent alien beings, with priority given those on the cusp, relatively speaking, of their own technological singularity. Perhaps that race is now extinct itself, but the self-replicating AI it created to do the job have spread like a virus through the universe, scouring it for intelligent life and then eradicating it when found (perhaps in the process determining it to be in their best interest to destroy even their own creators). Assuming this post-singularity civilization in the distant past achieved the ability to travel in reasonable periods of time virtually anywhere in the universe, this would explain why our universe seems to be "silent".

Sorry to rain on your parade. I think many of the other possibilities posited in this thread are equally if not more likely, but the scenario presented above is not impossible. In this regard, I found very interesting Stephen Hawking's recent musings that the human race might be best served by doing everything possible to avoid notice by extraterrestrials.

Edited by TianZi, 09 January 2011 - 04:04 AM.


#80 wiserd

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Posted 10 January 2011 - 02:24 AM

One problem that I have with folks like Sagan is that in his earlier calculations of the probability of life he neglected the fact that the center of our galaxy is filled with so much synchnotron radiation that it's probably lethal. I don't think it's a coincidence that Earth is on one of the outer arms of the Milky Way a safe distance from that deadly black hole. And if this requirement is true for most life, and if it's true that probes will have a hard time 'cutting through the center' it implies that any life which does exist may have evolved fairly recently (as the outer arms formed) and will have to go 'the long way round' to get to us.

Also remember, there wasn't even any helium when the universe started. It had to be formed in stars which went supernova. The helium had to fuse to form more complex elements with greater atomic numbers. And so on. So when does the clock start ticking on a universe that's actually capable of supporting life, as opposed to just a bunch of elementary gasses and stars? It would start a long long time after the big bang. You'd need lots of carbon, at the very least in addition to hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen. So atoms with atomic #s of 8 or less, at the bare minimum. Many complex structures like hemoglobin or chlorophyll require iron or magnesium which would only develop much much later.

And while the harsher environment at the center of our galaxy may eventually support more heat resistant silicon based life, silicon only comes into existence a long time after the existence of C, N, O, H etc. Which means that more durable silicon based life would have far less time to evolve than carbon based life.

Also, abiogenesis, the creation of life from non-life, is a far far stickier problem than most high school biology textbooks let on. The results of the Urey-Miller experiment are greatly overplayed. The problem of getting a string of nucleotides that are capable of self-replicating is hard enough. Then add in the fact that they have to be chiral, which doesn't happen naturally in non-life and you'll probably need some kind of external structure which helps the first RNA strand form. The hypothesis that life started on chiral clay is probably bogus since you probably need life to create chiral clay. And such a self replicating strand of nucleic acids, even if it formed by chanc cannot even produce its own nucleotides. It cannot protect itself. It can't even re-create the support structure that created it. There are a lot of unsolved problems, and they all point to the difficulty of abiogenesis.

Add to this the fact that, through all of Earth's evolution, homonids are the only species which, as far as we know, have developed any kind advanced technology and we see that intelligent life is something of a rarity. What did it require? Jared Diamond suggests that it required a huge east-west land mass and the existence of domesticatable megafauna. And maybe it also required a long stretch of temperate weather resulting from Antarctica moving over the South Pole.

There are probably quite a few issues not even considered here. But my take is that intelligent life itself is a pretty rare thing. And any other intelligent life that did evolve probably didn't come into existence too long before us and is probably very far away, on another outer arm of our Milky Way galaxy at the very nearest.

I'm very much interested in the question of how probable it was that intelligent life came to exist. The more that I look at the issue, the more difficult it seems.




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